Gerd Leonhard’s thoughts, finds and other comments on the future of ethics in a digital world

“In the past we put up with being annoyed and yelled at by advertising. And now we’re putting up with being spied on and guessed at, personally, as well. But we don’t have to put up with any of it any more. That’s another thing digital life makes possible, even if we haven’t taken the measures yet. The limits of invention are a lot farther out on the Giant Zero than they ever were in the old analog world where today’s media — including digital ones following analog models — were born.”

“The clear ethical programing AIs need to follow will force us to bear down and be much clearer about why we believe what we think we believe. Under what conditions do we want to be relativistic? What specific contexts do we want the law to be contextual? Human morality is a mess of conundrums that could benefit from scrutiny, less superstition, and more evidence-based thinking. We’ll quickly find that trying to train AIs to be more humanistic will challenge us to be more humanistic. In the way that children can better their parents, the challenge of rearing AIs is an opportunity – not a horror. We should welcome it. I wish those with a loud following would also welcome it.”

The Technium: Why I Don’t Worry About a Super AIhttp://kk.orgvia Instapaper

“The blind masses experiencing bread and circus adventures in Hyperreality while the ‘real’ world passes by entirely undetected. The ultimate triumph of inverted totalitarianism?

In inverted totalitarianism, every natural resource and every living being is commodified and exploited to collapse as the citizenry is lulled and manipulated into surrendering their liberties and their participation in government through excess consumerism and sensationalism”

Point is, a little technology is amazing. But all technology, all the time is dystopia. And strutting and fretting our entire lives digitally is a reduction of the rich possibilities of life beyond the algorithm. Even as the increasingly comprehensive digital footprints we generate are also, clearly, a way too tempting repository for governments and companies to ignore — and so they do the opposite: lift, store and manipulate the substance of our digital lives at will.

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“Right now, at the frontier of technology, people are deciding the future of human-computer interaction. The Myo armband is one futuristic input among many. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency for the United States (DARPA) has just announced that they’re developing a “cortical modem,” a direct neural interface that stimulates your visual cortex and displays information without glasses or goggles. It’s a heads-up display that plugs straight into your brain. Equal parts captivating and terrifying.

We believe that any digital input that disregards human biology — as the desktop environment did — can’t succeed in the 21st century. Our bodies are already rebelling against technology’s impact, and any device that asks us to act more like machines — by fundamentally changing our bodies, habits, vocabulary, or how we relate to one another — isn’t a sustainable option.”

“Only if we counter these technologies with a greater power of attention to the specific, the qualitative, the local, the here and now, can we keep our balance. This is the general rule, first voiced, so far as I know, by Rudolf Steiner: To the extent we commit ourselves more fully to a machine-mediated existence, we must reach more determinedly toward the highest regions of our selves; otherwise, we will progressively lose our humanity.”

Digital Ethics by Futurist Gerd Leonhard

Gerd Leonhard, Futurist and Humanist, Author, Keynote Speaker, CEO The Futures Agency, Zurich / Switzerland
Gerd Leonhard is a hunter and gatherer of human values from the future. From culture and society to commerce and technology, Gerd brings back the news from the future so business and society leaders can make better choices right now. In his latest book, Technology vs Humanity, Gerd explores the key ethical and social questions which urgently require an answer before we increasingly abdicate our very humanity. For organizations in the grip of disruption, Gerd supplies visionary insights and concentrated wisdom that informs key decisions makers today. A musician by origin, Gerd Leonhard has now redefined the vocation of futurist as a new humanist.
Gerd was listed as one of the top 100 influencers in technology by Wired magazine (2015).